This particular miracle involves a dog, now dead, a loose board
in a backyard fence, and some homeless guy we hope one day to thank.

Let's start with the dog.

Twenty-one years ago, she was a friendless black mutt in need of
a home. I did not want to provide one for her. She would never be useful for
hunting. She would never get big enough to contribute to our homeland security.
She would never be good for anything. And she would need to be spayed and
wormed, right off the bat.

But my wife and kids prevailed. They christened her Pepper.
(Later known as Pepperonious and Pepe le Pew, for reasons I will not elucidate
here.)

It turned out that I was wrong: Pepper had one remarkable gift.
She loved people with an absolutely pure, uncritical, slobbering devotion.
Anyone who spoke a gentle word to her, she slavishly venerated for life. And
when she heard that first kind word, she would whimper in ecstasy, denting
major appliances with her tail.

Pepper was also spectacularly dumb, even by dog standards. If
she got just two doors away from our house, she would be hopelessly lost. And
she was an exceptional coward, terrified of cars, all strangers unless they
uttered that yearned-for word, even dogs half her size.

Leaves rustling in the wind made her highly nervous. Because of
this great timidity, as time went by, she refused to leave our back yard. It
became her whole congenial universe.
So I stupidly did not bother to keep a collar on her, which will become
important in a minute.

How that board came loose, and how Pepper worked up the gumption
to slip through the consequent crack, remains a mystery. But sometime in the
early morning hours of Nov. 13, 2002, that's what she did. And I am sure she
had no clue where she was as soon as she got on the other side of that fence,
instantly homeless.

Which brings us to our homeless guy. I really know nothing about him. In fact,
I am not absolutely certain that he was homeless. That's just how he was
described to me by the people who spoke with him.

But as best I can reconstruct events, he must have been walking
along Government Street at about 2:30 a.m., when he heard the unequivocal
squeals of tires and hurt dog. The car kept on going. Pepper, with two badly
broken legs, did not.

But the homeless guy carefully moved her up into a yard. He took
off his coat -- our weather almanac says it got down to 39 that morning -- and
covered Pepper. He stayed next to her, stroking her and talking to her,
probably shivering himself, until well after sunrise. That's when some other
kind folks who live on Government Street came out of their house.

The homeless guy offered to give them all of his money - $42 -
if they would just drive Pepper to a vet. They refused the money. But they did
get Pepper to an animal clinic and plunked down more than $100 of their own
money so that she could be boarded and given a good shot of painkiller.

We finally tracked her down there and, after consulting with the
vet, made the decision to have Pepper put to sleep.

There have been times in my life when I have not had much
patience for homeless people. I remember once calmly explaining to a couple of
panhandlers that, given my mortgage and other financial encumbrances, their net
worth was far greater than my own. "So how about y'all giving me some of your spare change."

But I will never look at those folks in the same light. For the
four or five hours when she needed it most, that man made our dog feel right at
home. Despite her injuries, I'll bet she even wagged her tail.

(Update: I tracked down Pepper's rescuer about a week after this column ran in
November of 2002. He had read the column, which he said was precisely accurate
except that he had covered Pepper with a blanket, not his coat. He refused any
charity, but reluctantly agreed that it would be reasonable for me to
compensate him for the hours he spent with Pepper. I have not seen him since, but
he's always remembered at our Thanksgiving table.)